Project
Supporting dairy farm health management with automated detection (sensors) and decision support models.
This PhD project participates in the research programme SMART Dairy Farming, a collaborative project between Livestock Research of Wageningen UR, the Faculty Veterinary Medicine and a number of Dutch companies active in the dairy sector, amongst which Friesland Campina, CRV and Agrifirm. Goal of this project is to make a contribution to a profitable and sustainable dairy chain
with an efficient support of dairy farms by giving specific, context dependent, management decisions at the cow level using novel sensor technology.
In the SMART Dairy Farming project, three research lines are worked upon: development of novel sensors, development of models and transparent chains.This PhD project is an important activity in the research line development of models. Goals are: development of prototype detection models for heat and disease detection and combine these detection models with decision support models, based on standard operating procedures. The decision support models do include economic consequences of possible decisions. The PhD project is a collaboration between the Department of Farm Animal Health of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (www.uu.nl) and the chair group Business Economics of Wageningen University.